Black Halo

trembled about the shattered piece of wood he still held, as though they had never known the life that coursed through them. When he did finally drop it, that life sent his arms tensing, his tail twitching …

His body thirsting for more.

This is what it means? He stared down at his hands. To be a Rhega? More death? More violence? This is what it is to be alive?

‘Not the answer you’re looking for, Wisest,’ the elder chimed, his voice distant and fading. ‘But good enough for now.’

When Gariath turned about, nothing but sand and wind greeted him. No footprints remained in the disturbed earth, nothing to even suggest that the elder had ever been there. And yet, with each breath that Gariath took, the scent of rivers and rocks continued to permeate his senses.

Perhaps he should be concerned that he felt alive again only when he was grievously wounding something. Perhaps he should take it as a sign that his road in life was destined to run alongside a river of blood. Or perhaps he should just take pride in having knocked the teeth out of a giant snake that had now failed to kill him twice.

Philosophy is for idiots, anyway.

His concerns left him immediately as he plucked the serpent’s shattered fangs up from the earth and felt their warm sharpness scrape against his palm. He would keep these, he decided, as a reminder of what it meant, for the moment, to be a Rhega.

But he could not dwell on that. His feet moved beneath him as the sun disappeared behind the sea, and already his nostrils were quivering, drawing in the scent of living things.

Seven

HONEST AFFLICTIONS

No matter how hard she stared, the sun refused to yield any answers to her.

It had been a long time since she had first turned her stare upward, mouth agape and eyes unblinking. If her throat was dry or if the tears had been scorched from her eyes, she didn’t care. Her breath had evaporated long ago, dissipating on the heat.

And Asper continued to stare.

The sun was supposed to reveal truth to her. This she knew. Every scripture claimed as much.

‘And when the Healer did give up His body and His skin and His blood until there was nothing left for Him to give to mankind, and only when the entirety of His being was spent for His children, then did He leave the agonies of the cruel earth and ascend to the Heavens on wings heavy with lament.

‘He left no apologies, He left no excuses and He left no promises for those He had so freely given His body. He left but this: hope. The great, golden disc that reminded His children that He had taken only His bones and breath back to the World Above, leaving His body, His skin, His blood and His great eye.’

She could recite the hymn until her lips bled and her tongue swelled up, and that used to be fine, so long as the words that were uttered were the words she had sought comfort in all her life.

Now words were not enough. And the sun refused to answer her.

Her arm burned with an intensity to rival the golden heat she raised it to. Flickering, twitching crimson light engulfed it, the bones blackened as over-forged sin beneath the red that had been her skin. Each bone of knuckle and digit stretched out, reaching ebon talons to the sun, seeking to wrest truth from it.

Her reach was too short. And lacking that, she could but ask.

‘Why?’

The sky sighed, its moan reaching into her body and racking the bones boiling black inside her.

‘I’m sorry,’ the sun answered. ‘It’s my fault.’

No room for pride in her body, no room to take pleasure or offer forgiveness. She could feel the crimson slip up over her shoulder, sliding over her throat on red fingers and crushing her breasts in blood-tinted grip. The pain shoved out all other feelings, scarring her skeleton black beneath her.

She saw the ebon joints of her knees rise up to meet her as she collapsed, pressing skeletal hands against the dirt. The sun was hot now, unbearably so. She threw back an ebon skull, cried out through a mouth that leaked red light between black teeth, pleading wordlessly for the great eye to stop.

‘I’m sorry,’ it replied. ‘I couldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

Her screams were wasted on the pitiless sky, her pleas nothing beneath its endless, airless droning. It repeated the words, bludgeoning her to the floor and beating her into darkness.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …’

Eyelids twitched in time with the breath that rained hot and stale upon her face. They ached as they cracked open, encrusted with dried tears. The light assaulted her, blinding.

She blinked a moment, dispelling the haze that clouded her to bring into view a pair of dark eyes rimmed with dark circles, staring vast and desperate holes into her skull as a smile full of long yellow teeth assaulted her widening stare. She felt leather fingers gingerly brush a lock of brown hair away from her sweat-stained brow with arachnid sensuality.

‘Good morning,’ a voice rasped.

The scream that followed was swiftly silenced.

Long-fingered hands snapped over her mouth, drowning her shriek in a tide of leathery flesh. Another hand was under the first and she felt a heavy thumb press lightly against her throat, seeking her windpipe with practised swiftness.

‘Silence is sacred,’ the voice suggested in a way that implied it was no impotent hymn.

Whatever threat not implicit in the voice was frighteningly apparent in the hands, coursing down the palm and into the fingers that slid across her throat. Her breath came in short, terrified gulps. Her heart pounded in her chest, eyes terrified to meet the dark and heavy stare that bore down on her like a bird of prey.

Breath after desperate breath passed and the light ceased to sting. As a face came to the eyes staring over her, breath came more swiftly and confidently. The smile ceased to be so menacing once she remembered well the crooked bent to it. And, at the look of recognition that crossed her face, the hands slipped off her mouth and neck.

‘Not that I’m not thrilled to hear your melodic voice,’ Denaos whispered, ‘but it does get a little tiresome after hearing it for a few days.’

‘A … few days?’ Asper felt her voice scratch raw against a throat turned to leather.

‘A few days, yes,’ Denaos replied, his nod a little disjointed. ‘You took a nasty blow to the head.’ He rubbed a tender spot against her brow, wincing in time with her. ‘Not surprising. Lots of wood flying this way and that. Hard to keep track of, no?’

‘Wood … flying …’ And wet, she remembered, falling like slow-moving hail, herself only one more fleshy stone descending in an airless blue sky. Her eyes widened with the realisation. ‘We were attacked. Sunk! But …’ She felt the sand beneath her, smelled the sea before her. ‘Where are we?’

‘Island. Archipelago, maybe?’ Denaos tapped his chin thoughtfully. ‘Peninsula, coast, beach, shore, littoral … left side of an isthmus. Not sure, lost the map.’ He stared out at the sea. ‘Lost everything.’

‘And … the others?’

‘Lost everything.’

Everything.

The word echoed inside her mind and down her body. Her heart pounded against it, feeling surprisingly light, a familiar weight removed from her chest. She glanced down and saw her robes parted, exposing a generous amount of bosom, a patch of particularly pale skin in the shape of a bird where her pendant had once hung dutifully.

She should have been more alarmed at that, she knew. The pendant had been with her since she had first been admitted to the priesthood. It had seen everything, from her initiation as a novice, to her rise to acolyte, to